Abstract

Few, if any, organisations can deliver 'zero defects' service to customers. The
management of both complaints about service failure and the recovery strategies
employed when critical incidents occur is therefore important because of its actual
impact on consumer satisfaction and subsequent behaviour. The effectiveness of
service failure management is dependent on a clear understanding of consumer
reactions to service failure, recovery strategies, and the interrelationship between
them with respect to the salience of service attributes and the concepts of 'blame
attribution' and 'perceived justice'.
The thesis focuses on service failure and recovery strategies within the UK hotel
sector. It reviews the pertinent literature and reports the findings from two e-based
questionnaires which examined service quality, service failure and recovery from the
consumers' perspective. It is different from previous empirical work in this subject
area because in contrast to both the large majority of published research on service
quality and all previous empirical work on service failure and recovery, the
conceptual framework is not based on the traditional expectancy-(dis)confirmation
paradigm (where consumers evaluate a service by comparing pre-consumption
expectations with actual performance). Instead, the research problem has been
contextualised using service quality importance and performance constructs as
predictors of consumer satisfaction and loyalty. The study also uses real critical
incidents rather than the simulated service failure scenarios used by previous
researchers.
The analysis of service failure and recovery is therefore embedded in the context of
the consumers' perceived importance of service attributes. It was hypothesised that
the perceived importance of service attributes that fail ceteris paribus would
significantly influence consumer reaction to the failure, the perceived effectiveness of
recovery strategies and, in turn, the outcome of critical incidents with respect to
overall satisfaction and loyalty. Therefore, whilst the 'performance-only' approach is
now generally regarded as the most effective model in terms of its superior predictive
validity over 'importance-performance' models (performance weighted by importance) in studies of consumer satisfaction with service providers, in the
particular context of service failure and recovery, it was hypothesised and
subsequently confirmed that the 'performance weighted by importance' model has
greater predictive validity. The results are compared with those found in previous
research and the contribution of the thesis to the academic literature are discussed.
The implications of the findings for service managers are also evaluated.